Among the many scary aspects of recent terrorist strikes, and threatened strikes, perhaps the most frightening idea for western civilisation is that such plots might soon put an end to the travel revolution, writes John Waters
Already, there is talk of longer check-in times and permanent bans on carry-on luggage, bottled drinks, perfumes, toothpaste and even paperback books. After last year's London Tube bombings, the check-in rituals on this side of the globe became more exacting, and this seemed a small price to pay for human safety. But with each terror initiative, even the failed ones, the terrorists tighten the screw further, and each time a part of freedom dies.
For the moment, westerners continue to fly, and may willingly face considerable risks to do so. But there is something in the banality of the methods of the Islamist hate-monger that gives rise to a doubt about our capacity to put this threat behind us. For there is something here to be perceived about the nature of freedom, and about how we think of it in the context of human progress. It isn't so much that we tend to regard freedom as an absolute phenomenon or an absolute right. For the moment at least, we accept that there are limits on human freedoms - but only, one sometimes suspects, by virtue of our sense of the as-yet incomplete nature of the human scientific revolution.
At the back of the western public conversation for most of our lifetimes has been the amorphous idea that, at some unspecified time in the future, human progress would render freedom an infinite resource. Even when we acknowledged philosophical difficulties with this, we did so citing reactionary ideologies which stymied the progress project with backward thinking. Our western outlook does not countenance the idea of a circular pattern in the drift of human understandings. We see progress as linear, as emerging from the primordial fog and stretching forward into the dispersible mists of the undiscovered future.
We therefore see fundamentalist ideologies as hangovers from an ignorant past rather than as carriers of abiding truths or wisdom. Traditionalist arguments against, for example, abortion, euthanasia or stem-cell research, are frequently presented in modern political discourse as evidence of obscurantism rather than as expressions of anything absolute or ineluctable in the equation of human potential. And, because the messages of traditionalists are invariably accompanied by strong dollops of human passion - rage, fear, piety and grief - our sense of rational superiority makes it easier to elide the idea that the clash between traditionalism and the cult of progress may be telling us something about the absolute nature of the human project. To suggest that there will always be a price to be paid for progress, and that the further science takes us the higher that price will become, is to join the reactionaries. To suggest that a necessary balance between the human will and the unknowable requires us to match each new human discovery or development with its own weight in humility is to surrender to obscurantism and superstition. We can hardly doubt that those who try to destroy the West are evil and wrong-headed. But, interestingly, our increasing conviction in this regard tends to make us even more convinced of the value and sustainability of the project of progress they have pledged to destroy.
Even if their demeanour, ideas and convictions do not impress us, however, there is perhaps something to be said for an examination of their methodologies. We used to imagine that, to truly threaten the future of the West, the enemy would need to get its hands on the cutting edge of technology. Instead, he uses shampoo and soft drinks bottles, perfume dispensers and iPods - (all adaptations from the paraphernalia of our narcissims and self-indulgence.) Even as the civilised world seeks to push forward its scientific and technological revolution, its enemies employ the contents of western trash cans to attack and immobilise it. The Islamic fascists who threaten western civilisation as it has never been threatened have, in their thinking, put the scientific project into reverse, implying that their fundamentalism has understood something fundamental about progress: that it is not after all linear but can be made to double back on itself. Even the little we remember of tradition should warn us that there is a price to be paid for every freedom, usually the loss of a freedom previously taken for granted.
The fundamentalist terrorist seems to perceive this as a matter of reflex: that the more advances our societies make, the more vulnerable they become to attack from the most basic technologies available. There is, at the back of this, a principle that might be termed the supremacy of the primitive, hinting as it does at the limits of human attainment, suggesting that technology contains its own antidote, and that there is something inbuilt into the scientific project that renders it paradoxically vulnerable to its own baby-step achievements. The solution to our dilemma, therefore, lies not in discovering things we have yet to learn but in remembering what we may have forgotten.